Warning

This project is being split into 3 separate projects:

  • friendly_traceback,

  • friendly, and

  • friendly_idle.

The documentation does not reflect this change.

If you are a end-user, just install friendly until further notice.

why()

You read some interesting code found in a tutorial on the web and decide to try it out by copy-pasting it.

Screen capture of syntax error

So, this didn’t work, but you’d like to find out a bit more information than that provided by the terse hint shown after the traceback.

>>> why()
Python indicates that you used some unicode characters not allowed as part
of a variable name; this includes many emojis. However, I suspect that you
used a fancy unicode quotation mark instead of a normal single or double
quote for a string. This can happen if you copy-pasted code.

When you call why(), friendly attempts to analyze the code you entered and figure out what exactly went wrong, and quite often makes suggestions as to how to fix it.